Operators of Networks (typically combinations of WAN's, LAN's, PAN's and BAN's supporting two way interactive services and in some countries are called cellular network operators) of wireless devices today face a difficult problem. The problem is the result of the convergence of complexity and scale. The current technology for network orchestration is capable of optimizing very large-scale networks with low levels of complexity or high levels of complexity and small scale. Current networks of wireless devices face both very large numbers of end users creating very large scale and very high levels of complexity in technology, equipment ecosystems, and administrative organization.
Typical Networks today range in size from several tens of millions to multiple hundreds of millions of Nodes (active components including mobile end user and infrastructure devices). They are expected to continue to grow in size to support the ‘internet of things’. This growth in size is expected to be dramatic.
Complexity is a result of the history of the evolution of the Networks, the various vested interests involved and the evolution of technology and products. FIG. 1A illustrates some of the complexity facing the Network. It shows the multiple administrative units, each with its own Network Operations Center (NOC) 104 that make up the Network infrastructure. Each NOC has a set of databases of information 106 divided by each vendor of equipment used in that network portion. For each vendor and type of equipment there are separate control consoles 108 manned by separately trained individual staff members. Typically an operator trained on one console for one type and vendor of equipment cannot work on the console of another type and vendor of equipment. A further level of complexity is the ownership of the resources and NOC's. It is possible for all the resources and all the NOC's to be owned by a single corporate entity. In that case, however, different divisions own and operate different resources and NOC's. The different divisions jealously guard their own domains. What is more typical is that different corporations and government entities own different resources and NOC's. This ownership can be more complicated than shown in the illustration. For example, a local government may own fiber optic cable in the ground. It may subcontract the management of the actual fiber to company X. Company Y may lease access to the fiber to provide a basic network service which it sells to the Wireline company in the illustration. In this example, companies X and Y also have NOC's. Another example is that company Z may purchase ‘wholesale’ services from the Network under an MVNO or enterprise networking contract and then provide services to end users and therefore maintain its own NOC. There are many other typically occurring subdivisions and resulting NOC's.
One thing that is not shown in FIG. 1A, because it would make the diagram so complex as to be unreadable, is the profusion of types and vendors of end user devices. Networks try to limit the diversity of end user devices, but even so, the diversity is extremely great. It is not unusual for a Network to try to limit itself to five vendors of end user devices. However, over time that list changes, pressures from the marketplace force expansions in the approved vendor list and mergers also come into play. Then a single vendor may have as many as 50 product lines with multiple products in each product line. Individual products change to lower cost, meet changing markets and to fix problems or add capabilities through in field software downloads. The result is that Networks have thousands of different products, configurations, etc. Here again, the Network attempts to track and control this diversity with vendor specific databases and consoles.
The third area of complexity is the profusion of technologies. The rapid adoption of cellular, wireless LAN, and other related wireless technologies produced demand for better quality and better spectral efficiency (getting more channels into the same frequency range). These forces have produced a proliferation of Air Interface Standards (AIS's). An AIS specifies modulation, coding, error correction, protocols for channel assignment and other key technical parameters that determine how both the radio access network, backhaul and the rest of the infrastructure operate. Networks typically support a number of AIS's. Network operators seek to limit the number of AIS's but forces outside their control prevent it. The transition from one AIS to another may be through software upgrade in the infrastructure accompanied by distribution of new end user devices. An example of this is the transition from GSM to GSM GPRS. Other transitions require the construction and operation of two independent networks each with its own set of NOC's. The old AIS network has to run until all or almost all of the end user devices have been replaced with new AIS devices. This can take many years and typically before the old AIS is fully supplanted there is a newer AIS which replaces the old ‘new’ AIS. As an example, there are many Networks today which operate three independent systems for 2G, 3G, and 4G. Each time a new AIS is developed it promises to be the last one which will replace all others, but it is eventually superseded by a ‘newer’ one.
Modern mobile telecommunication devices are configured to communicate via provider networks in a variety of ways. For example, a device may communicate via a traditional base transceiver station, a femtocell, or via a WiFi or other wireless access point or through Blue tooth or other Personal Area Network (PAN or WPAN) or through a Body Area Network (BAN or WBAN). However, each of these wireless access technologies has its own family of Air Interface Standards (protocols, modulation techniques, encoding systems, etc.) and infrastructure, which have evolved at least partly independently over time and which are to date not well integrated. In many cases, multiple network and other service providers may be involved, for example, a wireless carrier operating a traditional base transceiver station, a local business or municipality operating a WiFi access point, and a femtocell user who uses a cable modem or DSL to backhaul call data over an IP network such as the Internet. The diversity of access technologies and owners poses challenges to the ability of mobile users to seamlessly obtain and maintain access optimally across technologies and providers, and for providers to orchestrate resources across technologies and owners to provide access, monitor operating conditions, meet quality of service and other commitments, etc. Some of these difficulties have been documented by NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Network an international industry association of approximately 150 wireless network operators).